A passive low‐frequency seismic survey in Abu Dhabi ‐ Shaheen project

Abstract

We present processing methods and results from a passive low-frequency (LF) seismic campaign over a giant producing oil field in Abu Dhabi. Processing methods include ambient wave field analysis and the mitigation of the influence of anthropogenic infrastructure noise. Without careful processing to remove these components of the ambient wave field, data are strictly measures of human activity. However, spatially and temporally consistent energy anomalies on the vertical component cluster within the center of the survey area. Available current reservoir data show some correlation with the energy attributes calculated with two different methods.

Accelerometer Sensor Specifications to Predict Hydrocarbon Using Passive Seismic Technique

“…For Δ = 0, thus = 2 √ , a damping coefficient. Based on (6) and (7), three different cases must be considered in order to determine the variation in designing the bandwidth, such as the following:…”

“…For comparative analysis, previously mentioned works have been summarized in Table 7 [6,7,34,43,46,[62][63][64]]. The first column shows the sensing type of accelerometers.…”

“…However, others have expressed some doubts on underlying theory of the technique and its applicability to different geologies and its repeatability [24,29,41]. Passive seismic signals are narrow banded (1-30 Hz, as shown in Table 10), of low frequency, and of low amplitude; for instance, the peak ground acceleration (PGA) for tremor signals can fall below 80 mg for passive seismic [7,22,32]. Low cost and environmentally friendly features of passive seismic make it an economically viable option.…”

“…However, observed seismic energy for determining hydrocarbon reservoir may have wider range. On the contrary, geoscientists may consider a range of 1-6 Hz as a typical noise trough in the background spectrum which is the only frequency window for hydrocarbon-indicating signal [6,7].…”

A statistical strategy for ambient seismic wavefield analysis: investigating correlations to a hydrocarbon reservoir

“…Some case studies describe observations of foci at depth obtained by applying the time-reversal principle to array observations of seismic noise (Steiner et al 2008;Witten & Artman 2011;Goertz et al 2012). Most other observations focus on simpler single-station analyses that correlate lateral spectroscopic features with reservoir locations (Dangel et al 2003;van Mastrigt & Al-Dulaijan 2008;Saenger et al 2009;Birkelo et al 2010;Goertz et al 2012). However, such empirical studies have been subject to considerable controversy (Lambert et al 2009a,b;Green & Greenhalgh 2009a,b).…”